Friday, March 22, 2013

Montage # 97 - Requiem in d-Moll

As of April 19, 2013, this montage will no longer be available on Pod-O-Matic. It can be heard or downloaded from the Internet Archive at the following address / A compter du 19 avril 2013, ce montage ne sera plus disponible en baladodiffusion Pod-O-Matic. Il peut être téléchargé ou entendu au site Internet Archive à l'adresse suivante:

For the final installment of our look at Requiems, I have chosen a performance of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor, with other tracks from his sacred catalog.

As I often do, I turn to the comprehensive on-line catalog maintained by Robert Poliquin and his comprehensive list of masses by Mozart – there are so many! Many of the masses are complete, and a surprising number are fragmentary – or only propose a single section. However, the Requiem stands out not only as having been left unfinished at the time of Mozart’s death, it is one of his few works to have been completed by a contemporary.

Composed in Vienna in 1791 and left unfinished at the composer's death on December 5, the Requiem was finished not by Salieri as Peter Shaffer's 1979 play Amadeus suggests, but rather by Franz Xaver Süssmayr who was Mozart’s copyist. The work had been “anonymously” commissioned by Count Franz von Walsegg asa requiem mass to commemorate the February 14 anniversary of his wife's death.

The autograph manuscript shows the finished and orchestrated introit in Mozart's hand, as well as detailed drafts of the Kyrie and the sequence as far as the first nine bars of "Lacrimosa", and the offertory. It cannot be shown to what extent Süssmayr may have depended on now lost "scraps of paper" for the remainder; he later claimed the Sanctus and Agnus Dei as his own.

E.T.A. Hoffmann once wrote that "[Mozart's] Requiem is the sublimest achievement that the modern period has contributed to the church." Mozart's deathbed composition held a high appeal for the nineteenth century; in the supposedly more rational twentieth, it ascended to truly iconic status. It did so despite fundamental mysteries of its composition and even its authenticity, mysteries still unsolved in the twenty-first century. Something in the music's gravitas and subtlety touches each successive generation. Mozart’s mass is one of the “unavoidable” in the Requiem repertoire: along with Verdi’s and Berlioz’s.

The performance I chose is the oft-reissued 1961 studio recording by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.

At the time he was working on the Requiem, Mozart composed his final motet Ave Verum Corpus for a schoolmaster in Baden near Vienna. Setting the four-line Catholic communion hymn for four-part chorus, strings, and organ in a simple yet sublime 46 bars, Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus was also his last completed sacred work as he did not live long enough to complete his Requiem. But with its severe serenity, the motet is transcendentally glorious, and in its final line, "Be for us a foretaste of the trial of death," the work achieves the sense of the eternal and the infinite that the Requiem never attains.

Famed for the beauty of its solo soprano aria Laudate Dominum (Psalm 116), the Vesperae solennes de confessore is the second of two settings of the early evening Vespers service composed by Mozart for liturgical use in Salzburg Cathedral. Both date from shortly after the composer returned from the abortive trip to Paris which witnessed the death of his mother, a period which also saw the composition of two important masses, "Coronation" Mass, K. 317, and the Mass in C, K. 337. Here are the verspers in their entirety:

The motet Exsultate, jubilate was composed in Milan in January 1773 while Mozart and his father Leopold were on the last of their three visits to Italy. It was for Venanzio Rauzzini - the most famous castrati of the day - that Mozart composed this work. Exsultate, jubilate follows a formal pattern little changed from that of the early eighteenth century Italian motet: two da capo arias framing a brief recitative, followed by a brilliant "Alleluia."

A fitting end tothis montage of Mozart sacred favourites. I think you will love this music too!